Équipe Renault Elf
1977–1985 · French · Wikipedia
Last based in Viry-Chatillon, Essonne, France · Paris metro (1977–1985)
Championship position, season by season
One bar per season entered, taller for a better finish in the constructors’ championship. Accent bars are title-winning seasons, green bars are seasons with at least one win. Gaps in the record are gaps in the bar row, not a line drawn across years the team did not race.
Why these are one team
- Équipe Renault Elf. The Viry-Châtillon works team that introduced the turbo engine to Formula 1. Unconnected to the Enstone team that later carried the name.
Where the cars were built
The archive records a team’s nationality, which is a racing licence rather than an address: Red Bull is Austrian and has never built a car outside Buckinghamshire. These are the actual sites, curated with a source for each, and each one placed in a metro where the workbook can rule on the town.
- Viry-Chatillon. The former Gordini works, to which all Renault racing moved at the end of 1976. Where the turbo engine entered Formula 1.
Getting to the finish
The share of car entries classified as finishers, by decade. This is the statistic that separates the eras of the sport more sharply than lap times do: a 1960s team that finished a fifth of its entries was normal.
Teammate against teammate
The same car, the same weekend, the only comparison in the sport with nothing else in it. Qualifying counts the races where both cars set a grid time; the race counts the races where both were classified, because a car that broke on lap two did not lose to anybody. The two denominators are different for that reason, and both are shown.
Season by season
Who drove for them
Where they won
Their best circuits, and the metro each one sits in. This is a metro site before it is a motorsport one, so every venue links back to its city.
Where these numbers come from
Results are the Ergast archive and its Jolpica successor, 1950 to the current season. That archive identifies a car by chassis and engine rather than by the company entering it, so the teams here are reassembled by hand; the rules and every judgement call are set out on the teams board.
Wins, podiums and poles count car entries, so a one-two counts as two podiums. Points are as awarded at the time and are not comparable across eras: a win was worth 8 points in 1960 and 25 today. Titles count finished seasons only, so leading the current championship does not yet count as one.
Points are points scored, race and sprint together, and every season from 1991 onward is checked against the official constructors’ table at build time. Earlier seasons will not match it, and are not meant to: for much of the sport’s history only a driver’s best few results counted toward the championship. Sprint wins are counted separately from Grand Prix wins, because a Saturday result is not a victory in the record books.
Factory locations are curated separately, in scripts/f1/bases.py, with a source per site. The archive has no address field at all. Each town is then put to MetroAreas.xlsx, and a town the workbook cannot rule on is shown without a metro rather than assigned to the nearest one.